If you ever tried to segment a list by engagement, you may have wondered about our member-activity rating. I’m talking about the little stars that look like restaurant reviews for your subscribers. I’m not sure how five-star restaurants get their rating, but I suspect it’s a little different than email.

To come up with a member rating, MailChimp tracks open and click data and measures that against your sending frequency. Actually, we get a lot of questions about these little stars and how exactly a two star subscriber becomes a five star subscriber. To find out how the sausage is made, we’ll need to look at the code behind member ratings.

Our five star system is based on a twenty point activity score, and we weight those activity scores unevenly. An even distribution might be good for my OCD, but loading activity points around four and five stars ensures that high engagement is easily remembered while low engagement is easily forgotten.

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Tofugu is a self-described “wonky blog about the Japanese language and culture” based out of Portland, but they’re more than that. The three gentlemen behind the site also help people learn Japanese via their online textbook, Textfugu, and their kanji learning application, WaniKani. “Learning a language is so hard,” Tofugu founder Koichi says. “Especially if you aren’t motivated to do so. Once you’re motivated, it’s a lot more fun and you really feel like you’re doing something great.”

To help Tofugu’s customers feel great, Koichi investigated MailChimp’s autoresponders. Inspired, he started crafting simple, motivational nuggets to send to new learners in the hopes they wouldn’t get discouraged. “The content is really varied,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a ‘get off your ass’ sort of email. Other times, it’s a ‘Did you know this is how people actually learn?’ sort of email. I try to write things that would motivate me.”

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Before we got into the thick of designing New MailChimp, we did a lot of research and studied the ways our customers work. We were reminded that our customers are under tight deadlines, and when they log in to MailChimp, they don’t have a lot of time to put together a campaign. So we looked for ways to increase efficiency and shave time off of the campaign creation process. We eliminated design elements that didn’t serve a purpose, and reorganized the campaign creation part of the app to make sure the information is clear, useful, and only there when you need it. We think it’s going to help speed up your workflow so you can spend less time in our app.

Here’s a peek at New MailChimp’s campaign creation process and campaign dashboard:

If you’d like to see other previews of what’s coming, we’re releasing a series of blog posts and videos that go into a bit more detail found here: New MailChimp

When first I started working at MailChimp four years ago, I had never even coded an HTML email. Sure, I’d been involved in web design since the late ’90s, but emails are a different beast altogether. The learning curve was steep, in large part because documentation on the “art” of HTML email was scattered at best. There wasn’t a one-stop spot to get people up to speed.

When it comes to email development, the prevailing attitudes are confusion and frustration. We want to help change that. That’s what drove us to start this project, and now we have an HTML email reference to share with you.

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Informed decisions require information (that word “informed” is there for a reason), and information is something we’re not short on around here. MailChimp research typically falls into two categories: primary research, which is new research tailored to answer specific questions; and secondary research, which is readily available and relevant research from past studies. Throughout the New MailChimp design process, the research team combined the powers of both our primary and secondary research.

During the redesign, we ran rapid-fire usability tests on commonly used and radically changing features to get immediate feedback. For instance, we wanted to test our Campaign Builder on as many eyes and on as many screens as possible in one day to keep our design schedule on track. We ran around our office with a testing laptop, recording a mix of friends and coworkers as they put the redesign through its paces on laptops and iPads. After several hours of 5-10 minute test sessions, we compiled a prioritized list of bugs, usability issues, and specific changes for our designers to improve. Our UI design performed pretty solidly on standard screen resolutions, but we did find room for workflow improvement on the iPad.

Testing MailChimp on the iPad with Silverback and Reflector

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